AES Show NY: Exhibitors See Broadcast and Sports Continue To Evolve

Next year’s AES Show will not be co-located with NAB NY

Updated 10/21/24

It was bit like an edit whose tracks don’t quite line up. The exhibits floor at the AES Show New York opened on Tuesday, Oct. 8 but not until 1 p.m. (after a full day of education events on Monday), the exhibits floor at the contrapuntal NAB NY didn’t open until Wednesday, and both show floors were open all day Thursday. It’s a calendar affected by a variety of factors, including several religious holidays. In other words, it’s New Yawk.

Nonetheless, both organizations packed a lot of people and content into the Javits Center on Manhattan’s West Side. NAB NY’s final tally was 12,000 attendees, with 250 exhibitors signed on (with a sizable number from sports sectors). The organization’s program also kept sports tech in the mix with such sessions as “From Studio to Stadiums,” which explored how production techniques enhance fan experiences across multiple platforms and featured such speakers as Bill Ordower, EVP/chief legal officer, National Women’s Soccer League, who talked about the growth of women’s sports.

AES Show NY 2024 was co-located with NAB NY at Javits Center.

On Oct. 18, the AES announced that “nearly 6,000 professionals, enthusiasts, and exhibitors from around the world registered to attend the 157th Audio Engineering Society Convention.” The organization had projected attendance of “over 10,000 audio professionals and enthusiasts.” Those who did attend experienced a densely packed and diverse presentation and education program. And the co-located events were fully accessible by attendees from either side of the bifurcated convention hall.

It’s Still a Business

For an overview of what SVG audio sponsors had in store, take a look at the pre-show preview. Here is what some of their representatives had to say about how the audio elements around broadcast and live sports are evolving and what they’re keeping an eye and an ear on.

At the Audio-Technica booth, where the BP3600 immersive microphone was on prominent display, Manager, Broadcast and Production Business Development, Gary Dixon noted that the larger broadcast business is in flux and explained what that can mean for broadcast budgets: “Everybody’s cutting budgets. But, at the same time, everybody keeps going back to sports, because it’s continuously live content. It’s evergreen is a good way to put it. It’s compelling to watch. There are always personal stories behind it, and audio is a big part of that. I think comprehensive audio coverage of a sport makes it that much more dramatic to deliver to the [consumer]. I’m bullish on audio, naturally — we make microphones! — but I’m also confident about it, because sports wants more sound than ever now.”

Mature Connectivity

Audinate’s Dante signal-transport format is a rare instance of a proprietary technology becoming a de facto industry standard; it’s now an equal to such standards as MADI and AES67. That maturity has the format’s parent focusing on infrastructure around it.

“Dante achieved a lot of its goals in terms of becoming a very dominant format in the connectivity world,” observed Joshua Rush, chief marketing officer, Audinate. “I think one of the things that are really important now is not thinking just about networking protocols, just getting signals from point A to point B; the suite of tools and APIs around that make it easy for customers to use. That’s why we’ve been investing so much in the software, the services, cloud connectivity, APIs, SDKs — everything to make the whole solution for end users more usable, because ultimately that makes their job easier. What saves them time and money is if the protocol is easy to use, integrates easily into their workflow, and integrates into the tools that they’re already using.”

Rush noted that Lawo, a major backer of the competing RAVENNA protocol, announced at September’s IBC that it is integrating Dante into Lawo HOME apps software suite, bringing to eight the number of partners that have integrated Dante into the software versions of their mixing and control systems. “It has been good for us, but it’s also important that the audio industry continue to find ways to increase compatibility across platforms. It’s cost-effective.”

Virtual Virtue — and Not

Virtualization was a constant theme at the shows. The heavy metal of audio products is moving further into ethereal iterations of software and cloud-based operations. That’s becoming the case for comms, too.

That was top of mind for Rick Seegull, SVP, technology and business development, Riedel, which exhibited its newly launched Smart Audio & Mixing Engine (SAME) at its booth on the NAB side of the show floor. The solution is not aimed at infringing on the creative aspects of audio mixing (the specter of AI taking over that very human role loomed over a lot of conversations at the AES Show NY) but rather, he said, “it’s for managing the aspects [of mixing] that can be automated. If you just need to track a level, if you just need to add a delay for something that’s going to go out over the radio broadcast, or if you just have two commentators in a booth and need to ride levels and make sure that their EQ stays consistent throughout, then you can take all these different jobs and monitor them from a single screen anywhere. That’s the concept behind this product.”

It represents, he said, a kind of specialization of virtualization, creating specific digital platforms, consisting of network plugins the company calls “super tools,” for specific tasks: for instance, preconfigured mixers for a specific job.

“I have four anchors in a room,” Seegull explained. “They each have one microphone, and I need a little bit of dynamics on them, a little bit of gate and compression or limiting, and maybe just a level match, and then just let them run on their own. I can basically just observe it [remotely] and see the status of those four microphones without having to constantly be hands-on.”

From a larger perspective, Seegull voiced what many others at the show have seen: products like these had their origins in the 2020 pandemic, which forced the broadcast business to an entirely new level of remote operations, one that had to work with fewer people to be hands-on.

Virtuality, however, has become more than just a transient response to a global trauma. It’s becoming a way to access the technology when it’s needed and not have to capitalize it when it’s not. In a way, virtualization is an extension of the product-subscription trend — shorthanded by the term SaaS — that was taking root in pre-COVID times, such as Avid’s application of it for its ubiquitous Pro Tools audio production, editing, and mixing platform.

“Let’s says you have all these rooms and consoles in them, but, when nobody’s in that room, that [console] is not making you any money,” Seegull said. “It’s basically just a waste of a resource. With a virtual console or virtual mixing engines, you can deploy those as needed and take them back as processing power when they’re not being used to deploy somewhere else. That’s the big advantage of virtualization.”

But the trend has potential downsides, he acknowledged. “You’re constantly relying on a network the whole time. If, let’s say, a mic goes down, I can’t just patch it real quick in the room. The things that we’re used to with linear patching don’t exist anymore. And it goes deeper: if a channel goes down, an audio engineer sitting behind the mixing console knows exactly what to do: unplug an XLR and move it to another channel. A lot of people operating a network don’t have insight into that. People aren’t virtual, fortunately.”

The Back Channel

Comms are taking on new roles in broadcast sports. Kris Koch, director, business development, broadcast network and media productions, Clear-Com, noted how comms technology has empowered the Video Assistant Referee (VAR) across a number of sports, creating critical back channels for call challenges during games and more.

“With replay becoming such an integral part in sports,” he said, “communication between the refs and the replay center has to be real-time and reliable. You can build a system in the replay facility and connect it to the referees on the field. We can connect it to medical spotters and doctors on the field. If somebody in the replay center knows that player may have suffered a concussion, they can immediately call the doctor on the field, and the doctor in the field can get that player and do an evaluation immediately.”

Koch added that encryption for this capability, which Clear-Com provides for the NWSL and MSL, is critical, especially as sports wagering becomes more ubiquitous. “Our ability to connect remotely over LAN or WAN or internet securely is an advantage when we’re working on projects like this because, even across an internet connection, we can provide a secure encrypted stream.”

Let’s Get Together

There was no shortage of panels and presentations focused on AI during both shows, including on audio. However, the coming AI-induced robot apocalypse wasn’t worrying everyone. The Dale Pro Audio booth was a very human kind of hub, an electrified agora of more than a half dozen manufacturers that was as much hive as farmer’s market.

“We’re able to reach a really diverse audience with products from production mics to the bleeding edges with Dante and RAVENNA [networking] and ST 2110 solutions,” said Dale Pro Manager, Technology Development, Joel Guilbert. “It’s a wide range of things here. The booth has become a hub for different manufacturers. It’s a show within a show.”

It was also reminiscent of how lounges in recording studios used to function as creative opportunities, the exchange of ideas and opinions, and an apt analogy for this particular show, Guilbert agreed: “It’s great having this manufacturer talk with that manufacturer and that manufacturer about how they can work together in the networked future. There’s hope that all these companies need to get in place for everyone to talk, and this is a great place to do it. Everyone’s right here.”

There’s Always Next Year

Although the Mets and the Yankees are realizing their respective Divisional Series hopes, October is the month when most teams say, “See you next year.” The mid-show announcement that the 2025 AES Show will take place in Long Beach, CA, and will not be co-located with NAB’s or any other trade organization’s expos left some exhibitors confused, though. Explained AES Director, Marketing and Communications, Kelly Reynolds, “The decision that we made was based on budgets and the demand from our members” after considering other East and West Coast locations. The NAB New York event will take place solo October 22-23, 2025, at the Javits Center location without a partnering AES event.

In the digital era, the National Association of Music Merchandisers’ and AES’s core constituencies — the former’s musicians and performers, the latter’s producers and engineers — have been increasingly overlapping. In 2012, the TEC Awards, pro audio’s main technical-awards program, moved from the AES Show to the NAMM Show in Anaheim, CA; a second major pro-audio awards program, the Parnelli Awards honoring achievements in live and touring sound, relocated to NAMM’s January main expo in 2017. For its 2018 expo, the NAMM Show unveiled a 200,000-sq.-ft. wing that has been dedicated to pro audio ever since. Because of increasing exhibitor and attendee numbers, the 2025 NAMM Show will, for the first time, run five days, a day longer than usual.

Asked whether consideration had been given to co-location of next year’s or other subsequent shows with the Summer NAMM Show in Nashville, AES’s Reynolds replied, “Not currently, but it’s something definitely that can be explored.”